James T.

I'm seeing a lot of these "expert answers" about frontend development and what does HTML, CSS, and Javascript do. So many of them over complicate it: HTML is content authoring. You are writing a document and should use the tools and formatting available to make it as clearly understood as possible. Most people should be able to write some HTML much like most people can post dross on social networks. However there is a big difference between a coherent, semantically correct HTML doc and some div/span catastrophe. The latter is more like the local racists latest rant with no punctuation, swimming with spelling mistakes, and they've tied themselves in knots over the fact there was once a rainbow flag in Morrisons. CSS is not just about making things "look nice". Yeah it'll make things look better but it's main purpose should be to improve usability, legibility and make your content more understandable. Finally Javascript - Javascript is usually unnecessary and I reckon 90% of the internet could do without it. A lot of the things that Javascript has introduced has made the internet worse, less stable, and less accessible. It's main purpose has been to make frontend development more like a programming discipline, rather than the design discipline it originally was. This is coming from someone who has built their career around frontend development 🤷‍♂️

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This is how I am mentoring my son his CompSci classes... I just keep repeating it over and over. I should hire my daughter to do the same thing as it's pretty common. READ THE REQUIREMENTS! That's all. That's every point he's missed on every project. Just read until you understand and ask questions if you still do not. His prof makes everything seem so simple, if you read and follow the requirements. But that seems to be the hardest part, the lesson the prof is trying to convey. He even lists the crash and burn rules. "If you support grammar that was not given then -100" etc. There is no room for misinterpretation. Therefore my help is just me reading the assignments back to him and making sure he has done what they say. Then again, maybe it's not a good lesson as requirements are rarely this in depth. Perhaps it's just 20 years of giving the same requirements that leads to this level of detail. I'll keep that to myself for now, he doesn't need to know that 🤫

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New blog post: The first 10k games at bgammon.org, an open source online backgammon service https://lnkd.in/gmc_c2ym #backgammon #foss #freesoftware #opensource #software #gaming #blog #free

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Notably not on this list: Swarm, the tool many game devs are forced into because our industry tends to rely on Perforce more than most. Swarm really is a poor tool, but its better than nothing. Crucible would be my choice, but though it has some level of P4 support it's not trivial to get and keep working and doesn't fully support all P4 features. Review Board is also good, but requires you to have some infrastructure and dev ops set up, its not as plug and play as others. Or just bite the bullet and switch to Git/GitHub, and put in some art asset friendly workflows and processes. That's the direction I'm leaning these days.

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If you think that the Trump assassination attempt somehow only affects Republicans, know that for some reason Bernie Sanders also cancelled his rally in Portland, ME for this Friday. The problem isn't that there aren't other candidates with better ideas--there are. The problem isn't that people are dumb and don't want a better future for the planet--I think they do. The best candidates are seldom the ones on the ballot. The higher you go in politics this is true: it is often the richest and oldest that are eligible for Presidency, and those with archaic ideas and that support the status quo, and those that serve for self gain. So once again, I'll be voting for the US Presidential candidate, whichever one is on the ballot whose ideas are more progressive. I will vote for the candidate not trying to topple government as we know it, or shake the hands of the Dictators whose hands snuff out the life of dissent. It was a Historic Meeting when Donald Trump shook the hands of Kim Jong Un, because he shook the hand of a despot that murders his own people for consuming the culture of other people, like the 30 teens North Korea recently executed for watching South Korean shows. Similarly, we must express our outrage at China's treatment of the Uyghur population. The Chinese government has detained hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Uyghurs in what they call "re-education camps." These camps are nothing short of modern-day concentration camps, where people are held without trial, subjected to political indoctrination, forced labor, and even torture. The world cannot stand idly by as an entire ethnic group is systematically oppressed and their culture erased. I get that some folks think we should just respect their Vote, but look, even Hitler and Putin were elected and that's just shit to think someone would vote for that, yet alone enough to normalize it. So this November, Let's Vote! Let's vote not to become America the Scared and Punished; lets not vote for camps; Lets not roll back the clocks of social progress when the hands of the Science clock will not be turned back by such rhetoric. No, we must work together to accomplish the impossible, if we want a future for our Grandchildren and their children on this planet.

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I have people ask me what is the main difference between ChatGPT Enterprise and Copilot. Today it’s which model and how many characters you can use, but 2GB upload and GPT Turbo is decent, but you may need vocal and 4o and that’s an important part of the story today. ChatGPT Enterprise - 4o the latest model, GPTs. There is a 3+ month delay for any partners using their latest model it seems M365 Copilot - model GPT Turbo (that’s the latest they can use as of today) and all the enterprise integrated tooling with Outlook, Teams, PowerPoint, WhiteBoard, Excel, Forms, Copilot Studio, Power Platform, Viva, etc… also supports additional integration to graph, connectors, with a ton of options etc…

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Tiffy Tsay & I's GDC talk is up on the vault! If you missed it and want to learn more about how VALORANT character gameplay develops, or how Deadlock came to be, check it out! 😄 Crafting Characters in 'VALORANT': Designing Deadlock https://lnkd.in/gYAWUgks

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The future of #gaming will be defined by studios that can deliver on the powerful trifecta of seamless performance, persistent progression and deep personalization. https://lnkd.in/gd8PgTPU

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The future of #gaming will be defined by studios that can deliver on the powerful trifecta of seamless performance, persistent progression and deep personalization. https://lnkd.in/gd8PgTPU

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A fresh perspective from Michael that resonated with both Guang and me: "...running a business lets you capture all the value you create, unlike working for an employer where your compensation is only a fraction of that value." (paraphrased) One of the reasons why Michael would continue building his own businesses (note that optimizing for most money isn't the objective). Catch the full episode to learn how Michael successfully grew and sold TinyPilot! https://lnkd.in/gndd3SsD

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Today, I finally finish up fixing up the issues I found in my vehicle examiner. Today was mostly just figuring out what the FOV offset does for the annotation interactable component. #unity #ar #gamedev #unitydeveloper

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Did a talk at the IGDA TC Chapter about Building Excalibur.js! We dive deep into all the bits of making the game engine! https://lnkd.in/g5Vr_M9Q #excaliburjs #typescript #javascript #gamedev

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Over the last few weeks I've been finalizing this pre-baked reverb prediction system in UE5 with FMOD. I'm working on a more extensive video about this, here is a short preview: One of the things that consumes a lot of time during development is placing and adjusting reverb/acoustic volumes. These volumes are generally placed in the world, and communicate which reverb should be used for sounds played in a specific area. Placing these volumes is a meticulous task that can take a lot of time to maintain due to iterative development cycles. I've been exploring the solution for this with a pre-baked reverb prediction system that uses offline line tracing to store data on reverb and absorption properties in the game world. A bit like how lighting bakes work. When an audio source plays in the world, it read the baked data from a point nearby and mixes that with the reverb of the players location. Some additional processing is done based on the distance and orientation of the source. There is a optional occlusion and portalling feature that places audio portals on corners and in the line of sight between the player and the source. These features are both optional because it's heavier on performance, and can be turned on and off for each sound event. Huge thanks to my previous colleague and Technical Artist Daniel Torkar. He played a huge part in tackling this problem.

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Fully in Dev mode for my Game Design course. Here's a quick update video on progress as of Friday. Build Build Build! Lots to cover on the story sheet. https://lnkd.in/g9a7mv_x

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